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Who you are working for?During my sophomore year, I started working with the ZGiRLS Foundation, because it aligns perfectly with my passion for empowering girls and community building strengths. Thenon-profit startup is a confidence building and mentorship program for adolescent girls in sports. ZGiRLS Curriculum™ has helped over 1,200 young athletes across the country build self-esteem and mental resilience in sports, and more importantly life.

How big is your company?
Former NCAA and Olympians athletes, Jilyne Higgins and Libby Ludlow founded ZGiRLS. Since 2012, dozens of interns, five board members, and two-full times employees have joined our company. In spite of our small team size, our impact on the world is immeasurable!

What’s your title?
I’m an Ambassador Community Captain. It’s a brand new marketing
role that I created alongside the leadership team. My focus is
activating and engaging our Ambassador team of Olympic and
professional athletes. Each individual represents and supports the
organization in unique way. Collectively, they are core to moving the
ball forward for the next generation of girls.

Can you share more about your day-to-day activities?
Building a nationwide community of all-star athletes takes a mix of
consistent and valuable digital and personal touches. On a daily
basis, I interact with potential and current ZGiRLS ambassadors on our social media channels (@gozgirls) with likes and comments . It is an easy way to casually start conversations as well as make our team members feel special. Beyond social media, I use texting and emailing to ask our ambassadors to
complete activities such as taking over our Instagram story or
participating in a webinar, as they all have committed to a monthly
investment of five to 60 minutes of engagement with our ZGiRLS
network. Once a week the founder and I work one-on-one to develop
strategy, initiatives and evaluate my execution; in the meetings, she
empowers me continue to creative ways of bringing people together.

Can you reflect on your internship? What are you learning?
There was a huge learning curve, because we created the role
together from scratch and started the ambassador program with a
blank slate. It has been rewarding to have autonomy to shape the
future of our ambassador community. First I was tasked with designing
and iterating a scalable process to recruit, activate and engage
athletes. Within five months, I grew the team from 20 inactive
ambassadors to over 30 engaged members of the team, which has
contributed to girls signing up for our Summer Adventure Camp. Being
deeply involved in the movement has led me to realize the power of
mobilizing women and girls make a positive change.

During my senior year at DePaul, I have had the pleasure of working at RPA Advertising. RPA, a full-service advertising agency, is headquartered in sunny Santa Monica, CA with seven regional offices throughout the US. RPA has 725 full-time employees across all offices and our Chicago office has about 10 of those team members. My position is as an Assistant Local Media Negotiator. If you’re like me when I first saw the job title, you’re probably wondering, what in the world does that mean?

Trust me, it’s not as complicated as it sounds. My role falls under the Local Media department, whose basic function is to negotiate TV and Radio airtime for our clients’ commercials. Some of RPA’s clients include Honda, Acura, La-Z-Boy, Dole Fruit, and apartments.com.

In my position, I assist the Local Media Negotiators with the execution and maintenance of media schedules. After a schedule is negotiated and ordered with a station, the best-case scenario is that everything runs exactly as it was ordered. However, there are reasons the TV or radio station sometimes cannot air the spot. A few examples of why this would happen are scheduling changes, breaking news, a rain-out or overtime during a sporting event, a new special being added to the schedule, a program getting cancelled, or even the station overselling the time slot. The station will come back with their best “makegood”. A “makegood” is an offer where the station will make the spot purchased (that is unable to air as ordered) good in another program and/or time-slot with equal or better ratings. One responsibility of my job is to negotiate and reject or approve makegoods. For example, the Local Media Negotiator purchases a 30-second spot in the Big Bang Theory to air in May. As May approaches, the TV station changes their schedule and sees that The Big Bang Theory may not be airing that week. The station would send a makegood for Modern Family. In this situation, I would pull Nielsen demographic ratings and consider the client’s marketing objectives to make sure that Modern Family targets the same or a better audience than The Big Bang Theory. If it does, the makegood will be accepted. If it does not, the station will send me a new makegood for evaluation.

Another aspect of my role is processing the media billing. After the schedules run, RPA needs to pay the TV and radio stations. One of my responsibilities is to make sure everything ran correctly and within client guidelines before payments are processed. Sometimes the stations will remove spots or makegood spots without approval. In those cases, I communicate with the stations to find out what happened and if it can still be approved for payment. These are some of my major tasks; however, I have other tasks as assigned as well.

Before starting at RPA, I didn’t know a lot about how the advertising world operates aside from what I learned watching Mad Men. My role has allowed me to learn a lot about how the industry works and get hands on experience doing work that keeps the agency successfully operating, rather than busy work or intern projects that never see the light of day. The culture is laid-back and everyone is very approachable with any questions. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time at RPA and I’m proud of the work that the agency makes for our clients. It’s pretty cool knowing that your agency was responsible every time you see a Honda ad!

I encourage other Marketing majors to branch out from current notions of marketing roles and to try something new – I’m definitely glad I did!

Avant is a financial tech personal lending startup founded in 2013 by Al Goldstein, John Sun, and Paul Zhang. They founded Avant with the simple mission of lowering the costs and barriers of borrowing, and they have definitely made headway with the company quickly growing to over 500 employees. I fit into the Avant landscape as a Performance marketing intern with a specific focus on our affiliate partnerships; I do a lot of research and analysis to make sure our partners are performing and happy. For a broader overview of Avant’s entire Marketing department I decided to compare it with a watch.

The Marketing department at Avant is like a watch. The unique design of the finished product appeals to consumers’ needs. However, while the design catches the purchaser’s eyes, it’s the intricate gear-work that really makes things tick. In other words, marketing is more than creating and promoting a company. It too has a “time-telling” function. At Avant, researching and analyzing data are the vital components needed to stay competitive and remain successful. Marketing encompasses a variety of skill sets, which is why Avant selects young talent with diverse backgrounds. In turn, this allows them to adapt to company culture and provide valuable contributions to the team.

Thus far in my internship my main projects have been creating an industry competitive analysis and monitoring specific partners’ performance. On top of this I have been learning SQL, a basic programming language that is used to run many of the platforms used by the marketing department and Avant. The combination of learning and contributing has been great and I have learned a lot about the lending and financial industries in a short space of time. My role should grow even further throughout the rest of the summer and I should soon be entrusted with a few affiliates of my own to communicate with and help onboard. I love the open environment within in the company which helps promote cross-department collaboration as well as the enthusiastic workforce. I am excited to see what the rest of the summer holds.

Interning for a company like Motorola Solutions, a big fortune 500 company, in the heart of the city, on Michigan Ave., and across from the bean, has been an amazing experience for me. Motorola Solutions, a publically traded company, is a relatively large company, with 14,000 employees in 60 countries. Obtaining this opportunity, along with being in a program with 5 other inside sales interns, and working alongside over 100 other interns in every department from across North America, has been the perfect scenario for my summer.

I will bring you along my personal guided tour of a day in the life as a North America-Inside Sales intern for Motorola Solutions.

I personally prefer to get into the office early, at 8am, this allows me to leave by 4pm. Other interns that are not morning people, prefer to get in at 9am and then leave at 5pm. Motorola Solutions has three offices in Illinois, the headquarters for the company is in Schaumburg where all the interns are except a few. The Michigan Ave office is the sales office, you may be familiar with this office because of the huge letters on top of the building that read “MOTOROLA” this is my office. On the seventh floor, in the far corner is where the six of us sit, each in our own little cubicle, with little name tags that read our names, “interns”, and then a picture of our school mascot. This was pretty exciting on the first day, along with receiving desk phones, laptops, and badges. Each of us are assigned to a mentor, a full time employee within inside sales. This is beneficial in so many ways. My mentor is amazing, she constantly checks up on me, advises me on what I should be doing, and truly just wants for me to be successful in obtaining a full time position at the end, and make me feel welcome.

I got a little off topic discussing more of the background information on the internship, but back to my day to day activities. First, I like to start my day off “Data Mining” this allows me to get in groove of working. We are sent an excel spreadsheet of anywhere from 100-1000 names of community colleges, police/fire stations, hospitals, anywhere really that would use two-way radios. We then look up the place, find a contact and import the name, email, phone, and website into the excel spreadsheet. I usually do this till about 12:30, this is when we all go out to lunch together. After lunch, I switch it up to a different activity called “CallWorks Campaign” this is where we are given another spreadsheet, and we call the same type of places, ask to speak to whoever is in charge of security communications, and gage interest on wanting to be connected with an inside sales rep to learn more about Motorola Solutions products, such as two-way radios, batteries, accessories, and body cameras. Although, I have previously worked in an environment where I had to make basic sales calls, I am learning more about different approaches on how to tackle sales calls. I do this till 4pm, where I then pack up my computer and go home.

Lastly, I will cover the random events that we, as interns get to attend. Once a week we have a “lunch and learn” where the head of each department such as finance, HR, marketing etc. come in and talk to us about their job, how they got to where they are, their specific department, and product overview. Lunch and learns, are of course where they cater a variety of food. Other special events that we do throughout the 12 week program, are go on the odyssey cruise for lunch and a tour of the city, volunteer for American Red Cross, and visit the cook county 911 dispatch center, where we will learn more about products and implementation. Lastly, another intern and I, got chosen last week to volunteer at a Motorola Solutions sponsored golf event in Barrington, which is coming up this week. At the end of the internship, all of us have final interviews, where they tell us if they are going to offer us a full time position after graduating. That is the extent of my 12 week internship at Motorola Solutions, definitely an amazing company, in which, I hope to continue full-time this December, after my last trimester.